{"id":355338,"date":"2026-03-20T01:50:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T01:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/355338\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T01:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T01:50:11","slug":"dolores-keanes-honesty-about-her-demons-was-as-piercing-as-her-singing-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/355338\/","title":{"rendered":"Dolores Keane\u2019s honesty about her demons was as piercing as her singing \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Irish singer Mary Coughlan<\/a> woke up in New Zealand earlier this week to learn of the death of her fellow Galwegian<\/a> Dolores Keane and paid tribute to the beauty of her voice. Coughlan moves next to Australia<\/a> as part of her current tour, before returning for a gig in Galway, continuing to deliver sets imbued with the soulfulness, lyricism, resilience, pain and power that also marked the career of Keane.<\/p>\n

The extent of the distances they and their voices have travelled is striking. A photograph in the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin sees Keane in 1978 at the Newfoundland folk festival. For Nuala O\u2019Connor\u2019s RT\u00c9\/BBC Bringing it All Back Home series (1991), Keane performed in Nashville with Mary Black and Emmylou Harris. These were voyages far from the thatched cottage in Carragh, Caherlistrane in Galway, home of her aunts Rita and Sarah Keane and a hive of traditional Irish musical endeavour where their mother May was a noted collector. The Keane family c\u00e9il\u00ed band stormed the dance halls in Galway and beyond in the 1940s and 1950s.<\/p>\n

Rita and Sarah did much to promote the sean-n\u00f3s tradition, while also helping to rear the family of their brother Matt, including his daughter Dolores as she absorbed the influences and found her voice. She recalled that even at the age of four or five the \u201cnoble call\u201d applied to her, and \u201cI was expected to do my bit … learning songs was like learning to read or to walk\u201d.<\/p>\n

That homestead was a zone of familiar and familial comfort, but Dolores\u2019s aunts also travelled with her to Scandinavia and made a mark at British folk festivals. It was fitting that the songs would spread, especially given the centrality of the theme of emigration. Keane\u2019s 1980 album with John Faulkner and Eamonn Curran was titled Farewell to \u00c9irinn: Music and songs of emigration from Ireland to America.<\/p>\n

The Belfast poet Ciar\u00e1n Carson<\/a> was keen to document the significance of such musical traditions in his 1996 book Last Night\u2019s Fun: \u201cAll along the townland shadows flit between the scattered lighted houses, until, late on in the evening, they converge on one house pre-arranged among themselves, or authorised by custom.\u201d In his seminal book Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, Irish historian Patrick Joyce underlined the impact of the emotional soundtracks aired in such houses, when \u201cmemory is so often at its most piercing, because music itself pierces the body, entering it, and taking up habitation there\u201d. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018A voice like hers does not leave us\u2019: President pays tribute to late folk singer Dolores KeaneOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Liam Clancy recalled the power of Connemara singer Joe Heaney: \u201cWhen he got immersed in a song he became possessed by that song. And it was like he was a medium. It wasn\u2019t an individual that was singing. It came out of everything that had gone before him. And anybody whoever watched him singing got that sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

These male reminiscences are a reminder of a largely male world. Look at the 1970s line up of the Bothy Band and you will see Tr\u00edona N\u00ed Dhomhnaill surrounded by men; or Keane amid the men in D\u00e9 Dannan. This was during a decade when another folk singer and collector, David Hammond, described the great surge of traditional Irish music and singing as \u201csomething that approaches a social revolution\u201d. <\/p>\n

But it was often the women who were the custodians, as with N\u00ed Dhomhnaill\u2019s aunt Neil\u00ed with her stores of Irish and Scottish songs. Yet as N\u00ed Dhomhnaill remembers of that decade \u201cthere weren\u2019t too many women who were playing or touring, bar Dolores\u201d. The scale and range of Irish women\u2019s musical talent achieved renown with the success of the A Woman\u2019s Heart album in 1992, and N\u00ed Dhomhnaill subsequently applauded the extent to which \u201cyoung women have come out of the shadows\u201d. But in recent years Waterford singer Karan Casey, one of the founders in 2018 of the Fairpl\u00e9 initiative to achieve gender balance in the production, performance, promotion and development of Irish traditional and folk music, was asking why there were still so few women performers headlining festival line-ups and concert billings.<\/p>\n

A profile of Keane in 1990 described her as producing a sound \u201clike pure spring water bubbling through mountain gravel\u201d. Nanci Griffith called her \u201cthe soul of Ireland\u201d. Keane was, in later life, brutally honest about the pressures her career brought. Her struggles with alcoholism, depression and cancer were well aired and her candidness, as with Mary Coughlan, who faced similar tribulations, was as piercing as her singing. Being the custodian of so much was no easy path, and as Keane saw it, her obligation was to nurture and impart tradition rather than inhabiting it for the purposes of self-promotion. She spoke movingly of the need to confront her personal demons, but she knew and accepted, to the benefit of so many, that she could not stop singing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Irish singer Mary Coughlan woke up in New Zealand earlier this week to learn of the death of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[986,92140,93,4500,61,60,102752],"class_list":["post-355338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-australia","tag-diarmaid-ferriter","tag-entertainment","tag-galway","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mary-coughlan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}